Multimodality may sound like a scary word at first, but it’s actually quite simple.

Many of us are used to

writing in an academic setting, but what many of us don’t realize often enough is that we are using many
of the same writing skills in other forms of communication and design in our daily lives. We are also
subjected to these same strategies and styles just about everywhere around us. Multimodality plays a
huge role in this all, and it essentially means having multiple modes of delivering information to an
audience or audiences.

The easiest way to think about this is through some examples we’ve all likely seen in the past. A
children’s book is one of the first experiences with this, especially children’s books made for babies and
toddlers. These often have interactive components of all kinds, such as buttons to press that emit
sounds or play songs. The cow still goes Moo, right? Sometimes they have flaps for children to open and
discover something new beneath.

There are images both moving and still all around, especially with today’s technology.

Perhaps some of them even have scratch and Smith components. The goal of all these strategies of
delivering information to a child in as many modes as possible helps to reinforce knowledge,
understanding, and learning. The more ways the same information is delivered, the stronger the
memory will likely be. We see these same strategies in newspaper articles, both in print and online,
sometimes frustratingly. These manifest in online advertisements, something we all likely find a bit
irritating.

Multimodality is the application of multiple literacies within one medium. For example, understanding a
televised weather forecast (medium) involves understanding spoken language, written language,
weather specific language (such as temperature scales), geography, and symbols (clouds, sun, rain, etc.).
Multiple literacies or “modes” contribute to an audience’s understanding of a composition. Everything
from the placement of images to the organization of the content to the method of delivery creates
meaning. This is the result of a shift from isolated text being relied on as the primary source of
communication, to the image being utilized more frequently in the digital age.[1] Multimodality
describes communication practices in terms of the textual, aural, linguistic, spatial, and visual resources
used to compose messages.

Multimodality is an inter-disciplinary approach that understands communication and representation to

be more than about language. It has been developed over the past decade to systematically address
much-debated questions about changes in society, for instance in relation to new media and
technologies.

Multimodal approaches have provided concepts, methods and a framework for the collection and
analysis of visual, aural, embodied, and spatial aspects of interaction and environments, and the
relationships between these.

The interaction of different representational modes, such as visuals and written/spoken word, is
referred to as multimodality. Multimodal representations mediate how various modes are mixed in the
communication process in a sociocultural context.
Multimodal texts have the ability to improve comprehension for students. When students learn through
different modes, they have opportunities to learn and understand information in different ways

Allowing students to create multimodal texts can help them express their learning in different ways.
Traditionally, students will read, answer questions, and discuss answers. That’s all fine. There’s a place
for that. However, allowing students to think about how to use the different modes to evidence their
learning gets at their learning better and gets them to a place where they’re not struggling. Some
students can have significant struggles with taking tests or writing essays. These students may do better
expressing what they learned through film, social media, or making a poster. So, we want them to learn
how to navigate these different modes and we also want them to see that many modes of expression
have value.